Tuff Love

125: What the Hell is ‘Great Sex’ Anyway? with Ken Blackman

There are many men in the world who seem to be succeeding at everything, except when it has something to do with women. Ken Blackman was once one of those men until he figured out that he needed to shut off that part of his brain that is asking for instructions and instead just let intuition take over. He has been teaching couples for 18 years on how to get to this channel of intuition, so they can get into a deeper level of intimacy and communicate each other’s emotions and energies. Ken defines great sex is one that gets better continuously and the ideal place to get this great sex life is through committed relationships.

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This episode, I have my dear old friend, Ken Blackman, coming on to talk about sex. His title was “What the Hell is Great Sex Anyway?” We talk about some very specific sexual techniques that might be a little confronting to hear. Hopefully it will add some value to you if you want to improve your sex life. Who doesn’t want to be great in the sack and great with nookie? For more shows, please visit RobertKandell.com.

Listen to the podcast here:

What the Hell is ‘Great Sex’ Anyway? with Ken Blackman

Ken Blackman has been on the show. He’s one of my first guests back in 2015. We talked about jealousy and non-monogamy back in the day when we were so much younger than we are now. Ken is my oldest friend. There’s no other way to put it. I’ve known him since I was a pup in the self-development world. Ken was my first mentor when I was taking classes with a group called The Welcomed Consensus. They gave each person a mentor and I was lucky to have Ken Blackman. Ken Blackman pissed me off as a mentor because he didn’t say much. He was one of those mentors that went, “Hmm… Ah…” You pissed me off back then. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that.

They told me to do that.

I was like, “Ken, I don’t understand what’s happening to me. All these feelings and emotions. I’m a straight white man who doesn’t want to deal with his emotions.”

You know me, I will talk someone’s ear off.

He was my mentor and then we were colleagues. I left that group, The Welcomed Consensus, to go off start OneTaste. Ken left the group and joined us at OneTaste in 2007, 2008-ish. He was my peer and a co-teacher. We built a men’s program there together called The Mindful Man and then The Ignited Man. He left OneTaste first, and then I followed on his tail. We’ve been close friends since then. Welcome to the show.

It’s truly my pleasure.

You’re an OG, Original Guy, in the self-development world. Do you want to give your bio or how you got into this? What’s your favorite story these days to explain how you got into this world?

Twenty years ago, I was a software engineer. I was successful by most measures but I was awful when it comes to relating with women. Every way that you can fail or do it wrong in relating with women, I did. I was needy, I was whiny. I was scared and intimidated with women. I didn’t know what to do. Women who are actually attracted to me, I held at arm’s length with my own low self-esteem. Everything was wrong. I was trying to figure out, “I’m getting into my late twenties. I need to do something about this aspect of my life.”I found my way to The Welcomed Consensus that taught men and women about how women’s bodies work.

From that one thing of how female pleasure works, how female orgasm works, getting deeply steeped into how that works, a whole body of a new way of understanding how men and women relate to each other in general started to come into focus and come into being. There was this period of time during which I knew how women’s bodies work and how to pleasure them better than I knew how to look them in the face and have a conversation with them. Over time, that channel had me learn a lot about myself as a man and how to relate with women like the depth of intimacy and actual communication and stop seeing them as some video game. If I pushed the right buttons, then the right thing will happen. It became more actual depth of connection with another human being that I didn’t think was possible.

Great Sex: The dynamics that take place in intimate relationship, you need to turn that part of your brain off.

In terms of your view as a coach and the twenty years, why do you think men don’t know how to interact with women? Do you have a viewpoint or a theory behind that?

We are trained in our life to develop the skill of figuring out the algorithm, figuring out the steps, and learning the trick like reverse engineering. All of those skills and the pinnacle of that in relating is either, in my mind, NLP or the pickup community where they have a set of steps that get them into bed with an attractive woman. It works. There are men who have succeeded in getting into bed with attractive women using these techniques. Then they discover it’s not actually what they are hungry for. The dynamics that take place in intimate relationship, you need to turn that part of your brain off. There is no way it’s going to serve you. The part of your brain that is looking for the instruction manual needs to shut off enough to wake up another part of your brain that is about intuition and feeling another human being in what real time interacting and things that are the real reason why we’re drawn to each other as human beings in the first place.

If your goal is to succeed in getting them into bed, then NLP and pickup is a good technique. If you’re looking to learn to be intimate with someone, you’re saying it’s a bad technique.

When we were teaching at OneTaste, for a couple years there was a huge influx of guys who had been in the pickup world for a very long time. What was interesting was they were coming to us not saying, “What we’re doing isn’t working.”What they were doing was coming to us and saying, “We’ve succeeded in our goal of getting to the sex, but what we’re realizing is we’re disconnected in our sex.”There was this whole new world of deeper experience that could be had that they were thrilled to discover.

That was my experience. They would graduate from pickup to “hang out with us” because we would put them into the obstacle course of getting beyond the surface into the wild world of powerful, intelligent women, which is no small game.

The topic that we’ve chosen to talk about, “What the hell is good sex?” You can be having sex with another human being and still be like two human beings with their genitals touching each other and you’re in total disconnection. You’re not connected to your body. You’re not connected to the other human being. You’re not actually present, like the guy is trying to control his own ejaculation and she’s wondering if she’s putting on a good show. They’re not experiencing what’s possible.

What’s your definition of great sex or good sex?

I work with couples. They come to me with where their love life, where their intimate life or their sex life is right now. We excavate and they get me on the page of where they’re at. From there, I say, “I get it. Here are all the things that are great. Here are all the things that you want to be better. Why don’t you try this for a week or try this for a month?” Gradually, their sex life is getting better. Fundamentally, my definition of a good sex life is one that actually is getting better. There isn’t any reason why your sex life can’t get better continuously for your whole life, even if there’s this idea that you have to have variety. Committed relationships are the ideal place to have a sex life that gets better year after year. Let’s say they come to me and she’s saying, “I just want him to slow down. I just want him to touch my body for a while.” Maybe he’s saying, “We’ll get her to say yes more often. I just want her to be more of a ‘yes.’” That’s the baseline and then we can move forward from there.

It sounds acquiescing when you first said that, “I just want her to say ‘yes’ more.” It’s a little manipulative, but it’s a good start from guys getting out of their own heads and “I’m going to do what I want” to actually putting attention on the woman.

What I noticed was those conversations are definitely serving each person is where they’re at and here’s where they can get better from where they’re at. I’ve been focused on sex, intimate relating, physical connection, intimate connection, man-woman dynamics for twenty years. If we’re in the industry, we never get to talk about our experiences because people either get blown out or they don’t believe it’s possible for them. I started this Facebook group where I said, “I’m going to talk about my experiences and my idea of some of the experiences in sex that I’ve had that I thought was good.” Not to say this is the right way to do it and certainly not to compare, but just to open people’s eyes to, “I didn’t know that was possible. I certainly didn’t know that was possible for me.”

You made me think of the story of Roger Bannister, the first man to run the four-minute mile. They said it was physically impossible. They did scientific studies that said it was impossible for a human being, a man or a woman, to run the four-minute mile. He ran it and 23 other people did it the next year. I love the sharing of the stories because we do think it’s impossible or it’ll never happen or that’s a myth. You and I are geeky, nerdy guys when it comes down to it. When we compared our histories before we entered this world, we are pretty much the top of the rock pile in terms of nerdy and Geeky. Here we are educators with tremendous crazy sexual and romantic history. If geeks like us can do it, I’m trying to say anyone can.

If I’m talking to someone and I say, “Let’s set a baseline of what we’re aiming for. Those are good goals you have, and we can totally do that. I want to set a new goal for you where in three months from now, you guys have mastered each other’s genitals so thoroughly that each of you can produce any amount of pleasurable sensation in the other person’s body for as long as you want until both of you are totally gratified. Every time you get into bed, whether you’re having intercourse, whether you’re just fooling around, both of you are going to get up where your bodies are completely satiated and gratified. Let’s have that as your goal.” They’re like, “There is no way we’re going to experience that.” Three months later, they’re saying, “This is great. Thank you. We didn’t think we could do it. It’s fantastic.” Then we’re into the unknown unknowns. If that’s your baseline, what’s next? We get into this whole territory that wasn’t even on their radar, wasn’t even in their realm of what was possible.

The concept of shame, let’s get specific on that. There are two things I’ve encountered a lot in terms of coaching people around sexuality. One is a woman’s shame around her whole body, especially her genital region down there. There’s a level of shame that she has about the way it looks, how it smells, and etc. Then you have a man’s fear implanted since birth of her genital region, of the unknown and the mystery of it. How do you coach people if you have a couple with her shame and his lack of awareness and his lack of knowledge? What are your steps that you take to get them into intimate relations around her genitals?

Get them to talk. Get his face all up in her genitals and experience it. Have him describe what he’s seeing, have him describe what he’s smelling, have him to touch it and describe what he’s feeling, and have her describe what she’s experiencing. One of the exercises when we were in our mentorship was that we would have the woman not shower for a week so that her natural body scent could arise in this potent way. Not to cover it up, not to wash it off, not to sanitize it so that people could smell each other. If you’re eating healthy, our bodies, our natural scent is amazing and it’s a turn on. A lot of the disgust is unfamiliarity. If a woman’s body and a man’s body are healthy, they smell great and it’s a turn on.

For the 12,000 downloads we have a month, they’re going to hear that and be like, “That’s a little challenging to take in there.” They’re not going to believe us. They’re going to go back to their status quo, and it’s true. I realized I had so much mental dislike of the body scent, not the body odor. I have so much mental fear. When I smelled it, when I brought it in, it was a turn on. It was part of our humanity. The commerce-based manufacturers that say we have to soap up and deodorant and have the right shampoo has stopped us from being the full sexual beings that we truly are.

Part of my intent or my goal on this particular conversation is to talk about some of the things that are not just one step beyond where people are at right now, but maybe three or four steps beyond where they’re at. Let’s talk about what’s available to them.

Great Sex: If a woman’s body and a man’s body are healthy, they smell great and it’s a turn on.

Give us another example. The first example was genital mastery, noticing and confrontation of it.

Noticing, confronting, setting aside your preconceptions in order to stop, clear your mind, and experience the other person’s body, experience the other person’s body.

What’s another thing that you work with your clients to get over these preconceived notions?

Since we’re talking about shame, let’s talk about performance anxiety, the crazy out-of-bounds one. I’ll take one very specific example that guys are familiar with which is ejaculatory control. He comes quicker than she does. I absolutely don’t recommend any ejaculatory control. That is not an approach that I use. It’s not an approach that I teach. What I do say is when you’re fucking, when you’re having intercourse, and you have to try this to see if it’s true, don’t just write it off, when you’re having intercourse, it’s easier to be in control of each other’s climax than it is to be in control of your own climax.

If he has his attention on her orgasm while he’s fucking her or if she has her attention on how close he is to going over when they’re having sex, they can control each other’s body a lot easier. The way I discovered this and then started working with my clients on it is there’s a certain level of honesty where sex is play. We’re having fun. I was having sex with this woman and I said, “If you keep fucking me that way, I’m going to go right over. I’m about to go over.” We talked about this after. She described her experience in that moment when I said that, and her first thought was, “I don’t care. It feels so good. I’m just going to keep on going.” Half a second later, she was like, “If I keep doing this, it’s going to be over. He’s going to climax.”

She didn’t stop anything she was doing physically. She didn’t stop moaning. She didn’t stop moving. There was nothing physical we could name about what she changed, but she just relaxed in a way that she had been tensing up, maybe to take herself over. She relaxed her pussy and all of a sudden, in that moment I was like, “What did you do? I’m nowhere near going over.” She said, “You could feel that? That had an effect on you?” Orgasm is involuntary. If you’re controlling it, you are already taking yourself out of the experience. You’re already compromising the experience you could be having. You’re supposed to go into an involuntary state. It’s supposed to be out of your control. When we started paying attention to each other’s orgasm, then simultaneous orgasm just got to be a fun game. Sometimes we could do it, sometimes we didn’t care. Sometimes it didn’t happen. It just got to be a fun thing to play with the switch of being in charge of each other’s orgasm.

You and I believe this, but most people don’t. All genders do not believe that we can control each other’s bodies. For someone new to this world and new to this experience, they’re very quick to ejaculate in the first 30 seconds and the first 45 seconds of sex. There’s so much nervousness, there’s so much tension. There’s so much connotation around this sexual act and them lasting and then in the first 30 seconds, they are ejaculating. What do you do with them? How do you recommend them to create that control?

I’ll give you a couple of simple suggestions. The presumption is I’m working with both of them and that both of them are willing to experiment. I can make suggestions to both of them, not just him. After a guy comes, there’s the refractory period where he can’t get hard. Then there’s this period where he can get hard and he’s not going to come again for a while. I would tell them, “Why don’t you try having sex twice a day for a week and see if you can find that period of time where his body is ideally in the state to have long sex. He’s recovered enough to get hard, but his body isn’t in that state where it’s just a live wire that’s about to go over.”

If you have a lot of sex, if both partners are willing to try this, to have a lot and frequent sex, then you can find out when is that period where he isn’t at risk of going over quickly. If you only see each other a couple of times a week, let’s say they’re dating and they don’t see each other every day, then he knows how many hours before visiting her to masturbate, to put his body in the ideal sweet zone where he’s ready to get hard and have sex, but he’s not a live wire who’s going to go over instantly.

What I was thinking was before the first ejaculation, the man’s psyche and system is in some form of scarcity. It is desiring the feeling of that orgasmic flow and control. Once you tell the body, “You can have it,” then after that refractory period, which could be five minutes or an hour, you can actually tell your body, “You can enjoy it in the abundance of the second sex act.”

Just them having a lot of sex will take him out of that mental and emotional state. In fact, I would go a step further and say the way premature ejaculation gets into a vicious cycle is because if he’s nervous and has performance anxiety, that causes him to come quickly. Scarcity meaning, “I don’t know when we’re going to have sex. This is so urgently important that I’m going to blow it, and then we’ll never have sex again.” That psyche causes you to come quickly. If there is abundance, if there is no performance anxiety. Your body relaxes and you can actually enjoy it and you end up lasting longer.

The more chill she can be about it and the more he has other ways to make sure that she gets up from the bed fully pleasured, whether he came quickly or not, the more that things are okay between them regardless of what his body does, that often, in itself, is the cure to premature ejaculation.

What I heard you say was that a woman’s anxiety, resentment, angst feelings has a significant impact on the speed of his ejaculate.

I don’t mean that it isn’t justified. It could be that she consistently doesn’t get pleasure and she gets to a state where she is frustrated. If you can get out of that vicious cycle, if there’s ways that he can pleasure her regardless of whether it’s through fucking, and if there’s a way that both of them can be happy with whatever arises, a lot of the problems are self-resolving in that situation.

I’ll share a vulnerable story. Morgan and I had a big bump in our sex life for about four or five months. It’s resolved and amazing in the last three or four months, but we had a pretty long spell. I did a whole show on it, my age, my difference, my body, some past, some trauma would come up and it was pretty rough there. It wasn’t close to ending our relationship but it created a lot of static in our relationship. The thing I’m most grateful for in my relationship with Morgan was our ability to talk about it, not to have it a dirty little secret, not to have it something we not confronted.

There are times where we got into some pretty heated arguments about it, heated discussions and Morgan type language, but we stay connected through it, which I’m grateful. It resolved in connection. If you’re a couple in a short-term relationship or even a long-term relationship and you’re at the point of static in your sexual relationship, the words of advice that I want to say is it is manageable. There are options. Stay in connection, have your feelings, respect your feelings, but also stay in communication with your partner because that’s what intimacy arises from.

Don’t let there be a subject between you that is so chargey or so uncomfortable or so emotionally charged that you can’t talk about it. Those are the ones that are most important for you to talk about. You can get all the way to the other side of resolution on this topic and you will end up closer than you ever were. The instant there’s a taboo subject, like a subject that’s too emotionally charged for you to talk about, that is one nail in the coffin of the relationship. You get enough of those and your relationship is over. Those are the ones you most need to talk about. Get a third party that you both trust. Get a coach or a friend that is willing to be neutral, whatever it takes for you to talk through it to get all the way to the other side.

You have a book, Powerful Woman, Confident Men. What’s your motivation for writing this book? What message do you want to get out into the world?

I keep encountering women who are confident. They’re self-assured, they’re intelligent, they’re successful in life. They’re sexually self-assured or in ownership of their own sexuality. There are all these qualities and what I noticed is it’s out in the world. It can get to a place where the more attractive they are, the more of these amazing qualities they have. There can be a fear on their part that is somehow a problem in them having a great relationship that somehow, they’re going to intimidate guys. They can be too successful, too confident, too self-assured, or too intelligent, and that they have to dial back.

I started seeing a dynamic like, “What happens in relationship with these women? What are the problems they experience with guys? What are the pitfalls that guys fall into? For the couples who are succeeding, what are they doing that’s working? What is the new model that is working fantastically well?”For men, I kept coming back to this concept of confidence. Not arrogance, not ego, not this fragile thing that is constantly at risk that she has to boost his ego, but a relaxed self-esteem and confidence that allows him to totally take the lead and have her feel fully, like she can surrender and relax and he’s got this, but also the confidence to not lead, to let her take the lead.

That also takes confidence, the confidence to say, “I apologize,” or to have his mind change. All of those skills require a level of at ease-ness and confidence that he can show up in the way that it’s called for. I also talk about the intuition that we touched on in the beginning. There is not going to be a formula that tells you how to operate with this woman. You have to stop thinking that you’re going to figure this out. You have to think you’re going to spend the rest of your life getting to know this other human being. There’s an intuitive spidey sense that I talk a lot about in this book. The third thing is passion. By passion, I mean the same thing that fuels your great sex is the same thing that fuels your biggest fights, and how to not dial down your passion, not have it like, “I’m suppressing all my strong feelings and we’re going to have a very smooth conversation.” Not to kill the passion, but to be passionate in the relationship in a way that works and brings forth what you want.

A new epidemic that I talk about and think about a lot is in terms of women’s power has significantly skyrocketed from the last 30 years, from the ‘70s and ‘80s to where we are now. Men are rather lost in how to relate to powerful women. This is the pieces of your book. Woman is making significantly more money than the guy. The guy feels less than not a provider. He loves her and they love each other, but he still has this doubt that he is not a full man because she’s producing more money. What are your steps or what do you recommend or what do you tell these guys to get these negative thoughts out of his head?

The way I liberate him from that fear is to talk about what happens if he were successful. What would happen if he as the traditional conventional provider in the relationship? Let’s say he made a lot of money and let’s say that she picked him. Let’s say that he ended up in a relationship where it was true, that she thought his wealth was attractive. What happens is they’re never going to have the sex that they can have because her role in repaying him for providing a great home, providing all these things, is sex that she’s having in exchange. She’s never going to be able to fucking devour him as a sexual predator that she is. She’s never going to be able to get in there and demand what she wants because there’s always this feeling of indebtedness. There’s always, in the bedroom, this dynamic of this is her way of repaying him for being the provider. That whole model has to be dismantled.

They have to get real about why human beings are drawn to each other. He has to realize there’s a completely different set of qualities that, in the long-term, are the real reasons she’s with him. It was never going to be a happy, fulfilling, amazing, one for the books relationship if he succeeded in winning someone over by his wealth, so dismantle that. The money is what each of you brings to the pot to set an environment where you can start having intimacy and closeness and connection and start building a life and creating amazing experiences for each other. That’s the only purpose that the money serves. It doesn’t matter who the fuck between you that brings it in. It’s not the setting for you guys to have an amazing relationship together.

What’s a great piece of advice for people who want to have that great sex? What’s your last telling thing? To summarize, confront the genitals, confront the body odors, confront the parts of ourselves where our mind’s taking over and blocking us from having great sex. We have a recommendation of sex twice a day for a week to improve your sex life. We also have, for a woman, to look at her resentment and the effect it has. What’s your last piece of great advice for the people?

You know how people say our biggest erogenous zone is our mind, that’s true. If we forget the body, if we have all these other things like porn or, “I have to have flowers in the room in order to be turned on,” all the brain stuff takes precedence over the fact that sex is a bodily somatic experience. You can’t let the brain take over the fact that sex is about pleasuring each other’s bodies. Keep coming back to what feels good to your body, whether you’re close to climax or whether you just climaxed and you’re in the refractory period. What feels good to your body right now? What feels good to her body right now? What feels good to his body right now? Bring it back to the body.

Great Sex: Our biggest erogenous zone is our mind.

Don’t let your brain get in the way of the body. Don’t let your expectations of circumstances to get in the way of the great nookie. Ken Blackman, it’s a pleasure as always to have you on the show. If people want to find out about you, if they want to work with you, if they want to buy the book, what’s the best way people can find you and contact you?

I have a blog. I’ve been writing articles and it’s a great way to get more information about the things I talk about. Email me, start a conversation with me. My email is Ken@KenBlackman.com. Email me, ask a question, and let’s get a conversation going and see if coaching is a good fit. If you want regular updates, check my blog. You definitely will be among the first to get updates, pre-release content, and special offers. It’s Medium.com/Straight-Talkers.

I’ve been reading it and Ken knows his shit. Thank you so much for coming on the show, my brother. It’s always fun. I’m glad to see this book and excited to read its impact in the world.

I love you, brother.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. I’m grateful to Ken and all these new audience coming on checking us out. The Ken and Rob show, infamous and long lasting, twenty years in the making. Thank you so much. If you like more shows, please visit Tufflove.Live. There’s a new website coming out,RobertKandell.com, with improved new pictures and etc. If you like the show, please get off your ass, get to Stitcher and get to iTunes, and leave us a little love. Give us some stars. It helps promote the show and we would be very grateful. Thank you so much. Go forth. Practice getting into people’s genitals, having sex twice a day, and definitely look at getting back into the somatic aspect of sex. I love you. Take care.

We’re laying down some viewpoints that are little confronting, smelling the body, enjoying the body, getting back to the basics of who we are. Thank you so much and we’re grateful. For more shows, please go to RobertKandell.com, our new website, and enjoy the show. Enjoy trying out some of these techniques with your loved ones. Thank you so much.

About Ken Blackman

Part unapologetic myth-buster, skilled translator, emotional excavator and master sex coach, Ken Blackman has been redefining the dynamics of intimate relating full-time for 18 years. Couples working with Ken become active co-creators of a completely new relationship that is unique to them. Ken’s bar for success is that his clients are progressively happier and more fulfilled with their lives years or decades after their time with him. Teaching female sexual pleasure and closing the “orgasm gap” between men and women was Ken’s literal day job for over a decade, and what he learned about how men and women relate to female pleasure formed the basis of his understanding of connection and coupledom in the bigger picture. His book, “Powerful Woman Confident Man” is due for release in 2018. Contact him at ken@kenblackman.com to join his active Facebook group or explore one on one coaching.